Is there a built-in function or plugin to handle date formatting in JavaScript?

Question

Currently I need to output a date in a: \'5 October, 2012\' type format. Meaning day-of-month with no leading zeros, space, full month name, comma, space, four-digit year. I

Answer 1

You've got some extraneous code that you can clean up:

var months = ["January", "February", "March", "April", "May", "June", "July", "August", "September", "October", "November", "December"],
    today = new Date(),
    completeDate = today.getDate() + " " + months[today.getMonth()] + ", " + today.getFullYear();

$('#theEndDate').html(completeDate);

Using a library isn't always the answer, especially if you are only going to use it in one spot.

Answer 2

There are lots of date libraries, but if all you want to do is generate one specific format from a date object, it's pretty trivial:

var formatDate = (function() {

  var months = ['January','February','March','April','May','June',
      'July','August','September','October','November','December'];

  return function(date) {
    return date.getDate() + ' ' + months[date.getMonth()] + ', ' + date.getFullYear();
  }
}());

alert(formatDate(new Date())); // 28 September, 2012

I think that took less than 5 minutes.

Answer 3

No, there is nothing built-in for Dateobjects, but there are a bunch of libraries to deal with and format them:

• date.js
• moment.js
• XDate
• Date and Date.Extras in Mootools
• Date in Sugar
• Dojo.date
• a few functions in Mochikit
• DateFormat (only PHP's date)
• date at php.js
• DataType in YUI, especially for i18n
• date-functions.js, used especially by JQuery datetimepicker plugin